A Native Tongue With Built-in Twists

July 19, 1986|By Mary T. Schmich, Chicago Tribune

BOONVILLE, CALIF. — The bright-lighters have invaded Boonville, and Wee Fuzz is none too thrilled about it. They whiz up from San Francisco in their Jaguars to dine on goat cheese pizza at the New Boonville Hotel. They flash their American Express cards at the local bed-and-breakfast inns, and they snooze there in quaint comfort between tough days in the hot springs, wineries and antique shops of the nearby valleys.

To the bright-lighters -- the Boontling word for ''city folks'' -- the language of Boonville is little more than a game of Trivial Pursuit, providing knowledge as diversion, facts without context. Its words can be taken home and shown off like souvenir ashtrays.

To the Boonters, though, Boontling is precious heritage and as natural a part of life as the hills and apple orchards of their sparsely populated Northern California valley.

''We're going to be like Napa Valley soon,'' lamented Wee Fuzz, raising the specter of Falcon Crest country with rumbling, soot-belching tour buses and streets choked by cutesy-wootsy chic.

''To the Boonter,'' he said, ''that's kind of nonch. Somebody should have put up a big old reel and not let any of these kimmies in. Then Boont would still be bahl.''

Wee Fuzz, otherwise known as Jack June, is one of the last speakers of Boontling, a folk language invented in the late 19th century by the residents of Boonville, a tiny town in Mendocino County, 120 miles northwest of San Francisco.

His remark, translated into English: ''To the Boonville resident, that's kind of bad. Somebody should have put up a big old fence and not let any of these people in. Then Boonville would still be nice.''

Bright-lighters with a hankering to do as the Boonters do might pick up a bit of Boontling at the Horn of Zeese (Cup of Coffee) cafe. They'll giggle over their linguistic feats as they study the Boontling on their menus, then order easters (eggs) or jeffered boos (french fries) with their horn of zeese. They'll feel cute when they announce that they're going to make a call from the buckey walter. A buckey walter is a pay phone, so marked in large letters on the town's public booths. The term is a combination of buckey, meaning nickel, and walter, for Walter Levi, who owned the first phone in the valley. ''You get a few new people who are interested in learning the language,'' said June, 63, a rancher turned forester who still meets regularly with a few friends at the Boonville post office to ''harp Boont'' (speak Boontling). ''But most of them are just interested in the dirty words.''

To the lover of lingua lewd, Boontling is a treasure chest of euphemisms. For example? ''You could get into the details of a mink and a kimmie bowin','' said June. A mink is a woman, often a well-dressed and sexually generous one. A kimmie is a man. It doesn't take an ear for languages to translate bowin'.

For 100 years, Boontling has been Boonville's second language. In the early part of the century, almost all of the area's thousand residents harped at least some Boont. In some periods and among some residents, it was used more often than English.

Its heyday occurred before World War I, before the automobile and the telephone rescued the valley from isolation, and before the lumber industry brought hundreds of new residents who ridiculed the peculiar lingo of the natives. During World War II, local legend has it, some Boonter GIs wrote detailed letters home that escaped censorship only because the censor didn't harp Boont.

Although only about a dozen fluent speakers remain, Boontling's popularity has resurged periodically, usually after a gray-matter kimmie (a college professor) or a greeley (a journalist, an allusion to 19th-century editor Horace Greeley) writes about it.

Boontling's origins are disputed. By some accounts, boys developed it as a code to speak among themselves at community gatherings. By other accounts, it began with adults who wanted to gossip at gatherings such as hop-picking campaigns, picnics and religious camp meetings. In other versions, credit goes to young men who developed the lingo while working on sheepshearing crews and playing on the local baseball team.

Boontling's structure is like that of English. Its distinction is in its lively vocabulary, which comes from a variety of sources, including sounds, situations, places and the peculiarities of Boonville characters. Some Boontling words are derived from terms brought by Scots-Irish settlers from the western Appalachian areas of Virginia and western North Carolina. Some words are adaptations of Pomo Indian and Spanish terms.

In the past, Boonters have been wary of talking about their language with outsiders, partly because they fear being mocked for provinciality and partly, as Adams points out in his book, because ''their names, anecdotes about them, intimate details of their behavior, and sometimes their weaknesses and mistakes are recorded in the jargon.''